Murder Road (25 page)

“I should shoot you,” Eddie said in a voice so cold it made fear go up my spine.

“You could,” Haller agreed, the gun never trembling in his grip. “But you might not kill me with one shot. And then I’d shoot
her
.” He meant me. “Are you going to take that risk? You think I care, Jeremy? I got terminal cancer. You shoot me now, you’ll save me some hospital bills. That’s all you’ll do.”

“Why?” Eddie said. “She was my mother. Why did you throw her away like she was trash?”

“Because she was trash,” John Haller said. “So am I. What do you think that makes you?”

The front door banged open and Officer Kal Syed came in, his gun drawn. “Drop your weapons,” he said calmly. “Both of you. Now.”

Neither man moved. Their gazes never wavered.

“Your move, son,” John Haller said softly.

Eddie’s hands were steady on the rifle.

Then John Haller pulled the trigger.

THREE MONTHS LATER

I rolled down the window as I drove, letting the cool autumn breeze blow into the car. Led Zeppelin played on the radio, coming from a classic rock station that had just come into range. I took a deep breath, letting the music relax me.

I moved to the right lane and eased off the gas. According to the map, the exit was close. Five minutes, maybe ten. Then I saw the sign.

coldlake falls. 2 miles.

I waited for something to bubble up through me at the sight of those words—fear, anger, anything. My hands tightened a little on the wheel, but that was all. I was going back to Coldlake Falls. I was ready.

After everything that had happened, it was time to go back.

I wasn’t in Eddie’s Pontiac this time. That car had too many memories, and the smell had never dissipated. Today, I was driving a Cutlass, and if I missed that Pontiac now and then, I never said it aloud.

I turned the radio down. “Wake up,” I said.

Silence from the passenger seat, and then Eddie stretched. “Where are we?”

“About to take the exit.”

He ran his good hand through his hair, rubbed it over the short beard he’d grown. “Jesus, did I sleep the whole way?”

“Most of it. You were tired.”

He looked out the window, watching the scenery go by. He was wearing dark gray sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, tennis shoes on his feet. He had lost weight in the last three months—most of it muscle. He hadn’t been able to train with an arm broken in two places, the bone smashed by a bullet, and his running regime had been replaced by walks. Some of his walks lasted for hours.

Now, with his arm just out of its cast and sling, he wanted to train again, though the process would take time. It didn’t matter to me that Eddie had lost his army bulk, that he was slimmer now, that he had let his beard grow in. To me, he was still beautiful.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said. “Do you?”

“No.” I signaled and pulled into the turnoff. “Maybe soon.”

Eddie shook his head. “We would have felt it by now. Felt something.”

“I honestly don’t know,” I said.

We turned off the interstate. There was a four-lane road with
a sign for Coldlake Falls—and just past the sign, another turnoff onto a narrow two-lane road with no sign. Atticus Line. This was where we’d taken a wrong turn that night in July.

Eddie and I said nothing as I sped past Atticus Line, leaving it behind us and taking the main road into Coldlake Falls.

Eddie took my hand and kissed the back of it, his beard scratching my skin.

“We should park somewhere,” I said.

He laughed softly. “You’re never going to stop suggesting that.”

“One of these days, you’ll give in.”

The last three months had been hard. John Haller had shot Eddie, and Kal Syed had shot John Haller. They’d had to do surgery to put Eddie’s arm back together. Haller had died within an hour without saying another word.

We didn’t know why Haller had done anything he’d done—if it was true he’d killed his daughter by accident, if so why he’d left her body by the road, why he’d filed a missing person’s report after so much time, why he’d come to Rose’s place to kill us. We didn’t know why he’d done something so obviously crazy, something he wouldn’t get away with.

Haller had no criminal record and no history of strange behavior, though he’d had a decades-long drinking problem that all of his friends knew about. His autopsy had shown that what he told us was true—he was suffering from a form of brain cancer that had been diagnosed only weeks before he died, much too late, and as a result was going to kill him. His final act of shooting at us was ascribed to the cancer affecting his impulse control and causing violent tendencies.

Eddie had come out of surgery, and a few days later we’d gone home and the story was over.

I cared for Eddie the best I could in our little apartment while he recovered. I lost my job at the bowling alley, but I got a new job as a receptionist at an accountant’s office, where the hours were better and all I had to do was look pretty and answer phones. I was good at both of those things. I was also good with numbers, as it turned out, so with my boss’s help I had started a bookkeeping course at night school. When I finished a few months from now, my boss wanted to hire me.

Eddie wanted to go back to work. His boss loved him—we got our new car through the garage—but it was impossible to fix cars with one arm. So his boss had moved Eddie to a manager job, dealing with bills, suppliers, hiring, and advertising. Eddie was a novice, but he was smart and he was willing to learn. Lately, Paul had started talking about having Eddie take over the entire business when he retired in a few years.

Eddie hadn’t had any nightmares for the last three months. But sometimes he had shadows behind his eyes. It haunted him that he had never known his mother, and it haunted him even more to know what she had become after she died. In life, she’d been troubled and trying to turn her life around—but in death, thwarted of her chance at life, she had become something else, an entity that wanted other young people to suffer the same fate she had. The smiling young woman in the photographs had taken so many lives, and she had tried to kill me. Eddie wrestled with that. There was no easy answer.

We drove into town, passing the hospital where Rhonda Jean had died, passing through downtown. Eddie read aloud the
directions I had written down, and they took us to a spot just past the center of town where a small church stood. Behind the church was a cemetery, a peaceful stretch of green.

As I parked, we saw a familiar blue car in the parking lot. Two teenage girls were leaning on it.

“You’re late,” Beatrice Snell said.

“You said noon,” I replied. I looked around. “Did we need all of the subterfuge? You really think someone might be following you?”

Gracie shrugged. “You can’t be too careful. Let’s take a walk. We have lots to tell you.”

The trees were in full color at this point in October, wild yellows and flaming reds. It was a perfect day, with the smell of damp leaves beneath our feet as we took the first path into the cemetery. “All right, we’re here,” I said as Eddie walked beside me. “Go.”

“First of all, Trish Cho,” Beatrice said. “From everything we can tell, she’s perfectly fine.”

I felt something loosen in my chest. It hadn’t taken long for the Snell sisters to find Trish, who was a dentist with a nice husband and a nine-year-old daughter. The sisters had taken turns watching her house for a while, noting as she left for work and came home again, seemingly innocent and unbothered by almost killing me. Either she was a psychopath who remembered that night and felt no guilt, or she had no memory of it at all.

None of us had ever given her name to the police, so Trish Cho could go back to her life, never the wiser.

“Okay, good,” I said. “What else?”

The sisters looked at each other. “Um, John Haller,” Gracie said. She glanced at Eddie. “Your grandfather.”

“It’s okay.” Eddie flexed the wrist of his bad arm. “Go ahead.”

“Did you find the adoption records?” Beatrice asked.

“It’s a long process,” Eddie replied. “I’ve talked to my parents—my adoptive parents—and they’ve put in a request to unseal the records. It has to go through a bunch of approvals, and even then, it might not happen.”

“So you might not get to know,” Beatrice said.

“I know,” Eddie answered her. “Shannon was my mother. Records or no records, I know.”

Beatrice nodded. “Okay, well. Gracie figured out how he found you guys that day, if it matters.”

“I overheard a conversation at the police station,” Gracie said. “I still volunteer there, even though I’m not in trouble with the tickets anymore. Anyway, I heard one of the officers saying that Kyle Petersen took a phone call that day from a man wanting information about the car parked in front of his house. Officer Syed had come to the guy’s door, and this other car had been with him, parked behind the cruiser, so he thought the car was from Coldlake. He gave the license plate and Kyle looked it up.”

“Our car,” Eddie said. “We took Robbie’s car that day.”

“Right,” Gracie said. “So Kyle told Haller the car was registered to Rose’s address and gave it to him—just handed out the information, no questions asked. Haller said thanks and hung up. I think Kyle got in trouble for the whole thing, because he left the PD. There’s a rumor he went to Indiana.”

That filled in one of the blanks in the story. We hadn’t known
how John Haller had found Rose’s address, and no one on the Coldlake Falls PD was willing to tell us. Now we knew why.

We were walking past the center of the cemetery. There were half a dozen people here, visiting their loved ones’ graves on a sunny autumn Saturday. Beatrice and Gracie seemed to be walking with a destination in mind. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Max Shandler,” Gracie said, ignoring me. She flipped her hair off her shoulders. “It was super hard to get information, even though we both worked on it.”

“I had to volunteer as a candy striper so I could try and access hospital records,” Beatrice complained. “It
sucked
.”

“No one wants to give out information,” Gracie agreed. “His file wasn’t kept in the records room like the others. I can’t even get hold of a Post-it Note with Rhonda Jean’s name on it. It’s like the entire case has been locked in a vault.”

“Still, we got a few things,” Beatrice said. “One of the nurses at the hospital told me that Max Shandler had brain cancer.”

I felt a chill at the back of my neck. “Like John Haller,” I said.

“Exactly,” Beatrice agreed. “Weird, right? Not diagnosed or anything, like he had no idea. But our hospital here is small, and we don’t have a cancer center, so Max got sent to Grand Rapids. I think he’s really sick.”

“Officer Syed told me that he tried to visit Max Shandler and got turned away,” Gracie said.

“Kal tried to visit?” I asked.

Gracie nodded. A flush stained her cheeks, and I realized it was at the mention of Kal. I couldn’t blame her for having a crush, even though Kal was married. “He talks to me sometimes,” Gracie said. “He’s pretty cool. I think he has some idea that there’s weird
stuff happening in this town. Anyway, he had some questions for Max, so he drove to Grand Rapids one day. Max is under security because he’s charged with murder, even though he’s too sick to go to prison. But Officer Syed assumed he’d be let in, since he’s police. He wasn’t. He was turned away.”

“He isn’t in a normal hospital,” Beatrice added. “He’s in some kind of exclusive, private clinic, under lockdown. Which is weird, because I don’t think the government is paying for that, and I didn’t think the Shandlers had that kind of money.”

“Maybe they came up with it short term,” Gracie said. “Max might not last to the end of the year.”

“Maybe,” Beatrice said. The word hung in the air, unanswerable. None of it made any sense. Why was a man charged with murder being kept in a private hospital instead of in prison, no matter how sick he was? Who was paying the bill?

Detective Quentin would know the answers. Though I was sure if I waited a thousand years, he’d never tell.

“We’re here,” Beatrice said, and suddenly I knew where they had taken us.

We stood in front of a headstone, newly placed.
shannon haller
, it said, along with her date of birth and her approximate date of death—March 1976.

The dental records had proven it. The Coldlake Falls PD, led by Kal, had found Shannon Haller’s dental records and matched them to the X-rays taken from the unidentified body. She was Shannon.

She’d been buried here in 1976, with a headstone stating only:
jane doe, found april 1976. rest in peace
. Now they had her name.

We stood there for a long time, silent. Eddie rubbed a hand over his beard, his eyes tender and watery. Finally, he said, “Who paid for the new headstone?”

Beatrice smiled. “A local community organization. I raised some of the funds myself. It’s called the Officer Robbie Jones Memorial Foundation. Want to guess who runs it?”

Rose’s windows had been repaired, but I still felt a chill as we got out of the car and I looked at the front window. I could still see John Haller climbing through it, his gaze on Eddie as I lunged with the knife in my hand.

Rose opened the door with a look of surprise on her face. “Oh,” she said, and I could have sworn she looked almost pleased. “It’s you two.”

“We came to thank you for the headstone,” Eddie said.

She flushed, a full-on blush that went from her forehead to her chin. She turned away to hide it. “You want some Bits and Bites? I got a bowl of it here.”

We stepped into the main room. It was strange to be here, where so much had happened. The carpet had been replaced—it had likely been too bloodstained to be cleaned. As Rose got the
bowl from the kitchen, I walked to the bedroom door and looked in, noting that the plaster where the bullets had hit was fixed.

“You got rid of your picture,” Eddie said in the main room.

I followed where he was pointing. The portrait of Charles and Diana was gone from the wall. There was new plaster there, but no new portrait.

“A bullet hit it,” Rose said. “Hit Diana right in the middle of the forehead. It was upsetting. I’d have been happier if the bullet had hit Charles. I don’t care if anything happens to him. I don’t like the idea of anything happening to Diana, even just a picture of her.”

“I guess you need a new one,” I said.

“I don’t know.” Rose put the bowl on the counter. “Maybe I’ll redecorate.”

I walked to the counter, and Eddie took a seat on one of the kitchen chairs.

Rose’s gaze followed him, sharp. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, Mrs. Jones. I’m okay.” He raised his left arm, flexed the fingers. “It aches a lot, but they say that will get better with time. And I can’t do a push-up to save my life.”

Rose sniffed. “Too bad. I need help raking leaves.”

Eddie smiled at her, one of his real smiles. And Rose almost—almost—smiled back. “Let’s go,” he said.

So the three of us went outside. In the crisp air of afternoon, we raked leaves and put them in bags. We didn’t talk, and yet we did. In our way, we thanked Rose, and she thanked us. We were even.

After an hour, Eddie went into the house to wash his hands, and I turned to Rose. “I have to tell you. I saw Robbie that day.”

Rose didn’t even flinch. “I know you did.”

“He was in the bedroom. I saw him as clear as I’m seeing you now, except he was a little transparent. He pushed me to the floor right before the first shot. He saved my life.”

Rose blinked behind her glasses, looking away. “That sounds like him.”

“Eddie saw him rounding the house into the backyard once. I’d seen him before, too. Heard him. But it wasn’t frightening. It was . . . warm, somehow. Really nice.”

A tear rolled down Rose’s cheek. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“You’ve seen him?” I asked.

She sighed. “He’s sorry about how he left me. I know that much. I tell him it wasn’t his fault, but he feels bad, so he stays.” She dashed the tear away and looked at me again. “He’ll be here until I go, too. And that’s just fine with me.”